Phenom II X4 940, the 3GHz version of AMD's Deneb core, and Phenom II X4 920 at 2.8 GHz will have an unusually short life cycle. The CPU will officially launch on January 8th and the last orders for these two will have to be placed in mid Q2 2009, sometime in May, we reckon.

The CPU will continue to sell until the end of Q3 and it might happen that they completely disappear be the end of Q3 2009. This doesn’t surprise us, as CPUs such as Phenom II X4 945 at 3GHz and AM3 socket and Phenom II X4 925 with 2.8GHz clock, AM3 socket and DDR3 memory support will be there to take over.

The beauty is that AM3 is backwards compatible with AM2+ and due to AMD's combo memory controller the AM3 CPU will work in AM2+ boards with DDR2 memory. This is probably one of the best things that came from AMD in a while. The combo memory controller that supports both DDR2 and DDR3 makes AMD much more flexible then Intel.